Data can be sent wirelessly to multiple users in a variety of ways. The data can be sent unicast, or “end-to-end,” in which data is sent by a provider (e.g., a digital content provider on the Internet) and routed through the Internet, cellular core network, wireless base stations (WBSs) and directly to the end user. When multiple users request the same data from the same cell site at substantially the same time or request a live stream, however, the data can be broadcast from the WBS to multiple users at the same time. In other words, though the data is being sent to multiple users, it need only be transmitted wirelessly once by a particular cell site, which saves wireless bandwidth.
Wireless broadcast is an efficient method to deliver data to multiple users, compared with sending unicast to each member individually. Technologies such as Evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Services (eMBMS) and Long-Term Evolution Broadcast (LTE-B) have leveraged internet protocol (IP) multicast in the transport network to quickly replicate data packets from a content provider server towards the cell site, or wireless base station (WBS)—e.g., eNodeB.
Of course, when only a single user attached to a cell site requests some particular content via user equipment (UE), such as a cell phone or tablet computer, broadcasting the content does not provide any wireless bandwidth savings. In fact, there will be an additional amount of bandwidth wasted when broadcasting to only a single user, due to signaling overhead associated with the broadcast technology. Indeed, even if multiple users request the same content at slightly different times (within a couple of seconds or minutes), the content likely cannot be broadcast due to synchronization issues.